“Thank you, Captain Niel,” answered Bessie, looking at him in a bewitching little way she well knew how to assume, “thank you, but I think I had rather not go out walking.” This was what she said, but her eyes added, “I am offended with you; I want to have nothing to do with you.”
“Very well,” said John; “then I suppose I must go alone,” and he took up his hat with the air of a martyr.
Bessie looked through the open kitchen door at the lights and shadows that chased each other across the swelling bosom of the hill behind the house.
“It certainly is very fine,” she said; “are you going far?”
“No, only round the plantation.”
“There are so many puff-adders down there, and I hate snakes,” suggested Bessie, by way of finding another excuse for not coming.
“Oh, I’ll look after the puff-adders—come along.”
“Well,” she said at last, as she slowly unrolled her sleeves, which had been tucked up during the cake-making, and hid her beautiful white arms, “I will come, not because I want to come, but because you have over-persuaded me. I don’t know what is happening to me,” she added, with a little stamp and a sudden filling of her eyes with tears, “I do not seem to have any will of my own left. When I want to do one thing and you want me to do another it is I who have to do what you want; and I tell you I don’t like it, Captain Niel, and I shall be very cross out walking;” and sweeping past him, on her way to fetch her hat, in that peculiarly graceful fashion which angry women can sometimes assume, she left John to reflect that he never saw a more charming or taking lady in Europe or out of it.
He had half a mind to risk it and ask her to marry him. But then, perhaps, she might refuse him, and that was a contingency which he did not quite appreciate. After their first youth few men altogether relish the idea of putting themselves in a position that gives a capricious woman an opportunity of first figuratively “jumping” on them, and then perhaps holding them up to the scorn and obloquy of her friends, relations, and other admirers. For, unfortunately, until the opposite is clearly demonstrated, many men are apt to believe that not a few women are by nature capricious, shallow, and unreliable; and John Niel, owing, possibly, to that unhappy little experience of his youth, must be reckoned among their misguided ranks.